The Libyan Conflict: An Excessive 'Militiafication' of Politics (2/5)

Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Libya has not been undergoing some unfinished transition, but has settled into a lasting state of political dissolution. Far from paving the way for a reconstruction process, the brutal disappearance of Muammar Gaddafi's regime, on the contrary, triggered a long sequence of fragmentation, where armed violence progressively replaced the state as the organizing principle of power, as in Sudan.

This series offers a structural reading of the Libyan war as a stabilized and coherent system in itself, embedded in regional and international rivalries, and now capable of eliminating any political alternative that does not fit its logic.

Considering the 'militiafication' of Libya as the result of an accidental post-2011 malfunction is at least a hazardous initial premise. The process of normalizing militias has become a kind of structuring logic of the post-Gaddafi 'system.' From the moment the state collapsed without a succession mechanism, armed violence ceased to be just another tool, progressively establishing itself as the central driver of politics. And this shift, far from being caused by a sudden break, settled in insidiously, through successive slips, at the pace of tactical compromises presented as temporary and which, along the way, became irreversible.

In the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi's fall, the revolutionary brigades were initially perceived as transitional security forces, tasked with filling a void while awaiting the reconstitution of national institutions. But this fiction of 'armed transition' rested on the erroneous assumption that violence would agree to disappear on its own once its initial function was accomplished. Not at all! Violence was not instrumentalized by politics; rather, it slowly and inexorably substituted it.

Thus, the militias were never demobilized. And for good reason: no authority was able to compel them to do so. Very quickly, they understood that their existence depended neither on legality nor international recognition, but on their ability to control territories, infrastructures, and flows, through military control, obviously, but also economic, social - and sometimes even symbolic control. A militia's authority over a piece of territory - a neighborhood, a port, a ministry, or a bank - is pernicious par excellence, insofar as it makes any governance impossible without it.

This process profoundly transformed the nature of power, as the question was no longer who governs... Power became synonymous with blocking and torpedoing, insofar as it aims to prevent others from governing without its consent. In this sense, politics was reduced to a game of armed veto, with each significant actor possessing sufficient capacity for obstruction to hinder any attempt to centralize authority.

“Political entrepreneurs”

The direct consequence of this configuration has been the devaluation of institutions. Successive governments, whether based in Tripoli or elsewhere, have no longer been evaluated on their capacity to administer, but on their ability to deal with prevalent armed groups. The state budget has become an instrument of co-optation, ministerial posts bargaining chips, and legitimacy has withered in favor of the brutal realism of power relations. Thus, militias have ceased to be peripheral actors to become, in a way, 'political entrepreneurs,' developing rational strategies, investing in alliances, and diversifying their sources of income. The control of migration routes, trafficking, oil installations, or public markets is today the economic 'essence' of Libyan politics, built on the vestiges of a continuously vampirized state reduced to a legal fiction, a 'cash cow,' and a trinket for legitimizing parastatal relations with the outside. Textbook 'militiaism,' in other words.textbook, in other words.

Consequently, militias have no interest in fully rebuilding the state apparatus, since a functional state would reintroduce rules, hierarchy, predictability. Meaning. Law. Conversely, a weak, fragmented, permanently negotiable state maximizes their room for maneuver at will. A windfall.

Managing an unstable balance

Amidst this militia order that has established itself through disorder, governing in Libya now amounts to managing an unstable balance between competing armed groups, each capable of tipping the situation through targeted escalation. And it is according to this logic that the emergence of military figures whose leitmotif is to 'restore order,' purportedly, should be explained.

Khalifa Haftar is the perfect expression of the excrescences generated by chaos. His rise to power rests entirely on the promise of a regained pseudo-verticality. However, this promise relies on the same mechanisms it claims to overcome: armed loyalties, external support, war economy, etc. Failing to dismantle 'militiafication,' Haftar simply seeks to centralize it under his own authority. And the attempt partially fails because it collides with other militias that are just as rational, just as locally entrenched, and just as externally supported. The war in Tripoli, in 2019-2020, which produced neither a lasting victor nor state reconstruction, illustrates the impasse of the 'Haftar approach,' in the sense that it constitutes proof of the failure of military force as an instrument for refounding the political order.

An adjustment variable

The 'militiafication' also has a significant deep social effect: it redefines local hierarchies, values the capacity for violence, and marginalizes civilian elites. Unarmed political actors are thus relegated to the role of secondary mediators or symbolic figures, and their room for action depends entirely on their ability to lean on an armed force, even at the cost of major concessions.

In such a landscape of desolation, the civilian population becomes an adjustment variable. Periods of calm do not correspond to pacification processes, but to temporary balances between armed groups. War is never far; it is suspended, never resolved, and this permanent suspension produces a form of normalization of violence, which becomes predictable, integrated into calculations, and accepted as an insurmountable horizon. The only horizon of war is war, war, and again war.

The 'militiafication' of Libyan politics is not a fleeting pathology, but the logical result of a precise historical sequence, in this case, the destruction of the state without succession, followed by an implicit delegation of coercion to local actors. Once this threshold is crossed, returning becomes extremely costly. Disarming a militia does not only mean taking away its weapons. The current example of Hezbollah in Lebanon is the most striking proof of this. It also means taking away its role, its income, its social position, and sometimes even its identity.

This explains why all attempts at reintegration, disarmament, or security reform fail. 'Militiafication' is no longer a technical problem since it has established itself as a total political fact. And to downplay its importance is to postpone the solution indefinitely, and infinitely prolong Libya's agony. The problem is not an excess of militias stricto sensu, but the absence of a political order capable of rendering them obsolete, useless, laughable. And as long as this order is not rethought from its roots, violence will continue to be the pivot of the system through self-generation.

Next article: 'Two Libyas' and an elusive sovereignty

Read on the same topic: 2011, Libya in the post-state era